Author Archive

If you’re a die-hard Persona fan, there’s a good chance you have every game in the series—Persona, Persona 2: Innocent Sin, Persona 3 Portable, and the recent Persona 4 Golden—playable on PS Vita… except one. Persona 2 was split into two games — Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment — the former of which came out on PSP in 2011 and the latter having had no American release.

A lot of unusual things go on here at ATLUS, and as a publisher known for delivering great JRPG content, Demon’s Souls represented something unique even for us: runaway mainstream success. In the years since its release, Demon’s Souls went far above and beyond our usual humble offerings, partly because it’s such a special game. It’s a Japanese-developed RPG, made by From Software, but it has a distinctly Western look and feel in the weight of its movements and the ruthlessness of its enemies and environments. It’s a single-player title, but it has a strong online component unlike anything that came before it, where you can summon other players as friendly ghosts to give you a hand, or be invaded by hostile marauders without warning. Its unsparing difficulty seemed to mark it as destined to be appreciated only by a select few, yet it’s been universally lauded (and awarded Game of the Year by a few, including GameSpot) and remains our highest-selling title ever.

Like the president of the Hair Club for Men who’s also a member, I’m not just part of the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona localization team, I’m also a fan. I was there in 1996 as the original game was released on PlayStation to an audience of RPG fans who needed something to play until Final […]